Without federal aid, Amtrak could leave rural areas behind

Published: Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2013 10:05 a.m. CST

By Curtis Tate — McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (MCT) — They're among the last holdovers from the golden age of American train travel, but the changing relationship between the federal government and the states could mean the end of the line for some of Amtrak's long-distance routes.

States have shown they're willing to pay for popular Amtrak corridors within their borders, but it's less than certain that they could assume responsibility for more than a dozen cross-country trains that date to the creation of Amtrak by Congress in 1970.

Passenger trains have been stopping in Hutchinson, Kan., since the early 1870s. But the agricultural center of 42,000 is in danger of losing the one that still stops there every day.

"The bottom line is when you have something, and you've had it for so long and it's served so many people, you hate to lose it," said Hutchinson City Manager John Deardoff.

To critics, Amtrak's long-distance trains don't reflect the way Americans travel today. They carry the fewest passengers and lose the most money — money that could be spent elsewhere, such as Amtrak's heavily traveled Northeast Corridor.

In a May hearing, Rep. Jeff Denham, a California Republican and chairman of the railroads subcommittee in the House of Representatives, noted that Amtrak's long-distance routes lost a combined $600 million in 2012.

"We simply cannot afford to continue these levels of subsidized losses year after year," Denham said.

To supporters, the trains provide a lifeline to rural communities far from major airports and interstate highways. They help travelers bypass airport security and traffic jams. They're more accessible to the elderly and disabled.

"People appreciate the range of travel alternatives an integrated national system can offer," Amtrak president and CEO Joseph Boardman said in testimony at the May hearing.

One of those trains is the Southwest Chief, which clicks off 2,265 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles. With the exception of Kansas City, Mo., Topeka, Kan., and Albuquerque, N.M., the backdrop is mostly prairie, mountains and desert. But the train also serves dozens of small towns, including several in western Kansas.

"If you look at these small communities," Boardman said in an October conference call with reporters, "they depend on Amtrak being accessible."

The Southwest Chief calls in Hutchinson in the middle of the night, and the station ranks pretty far down the list in annual boardings. The city has highways and an airport. Still, Deardoff, the city manager, said, it's a valued link.

But neither federal nor state funding may be available to sustain long-distance service.

The train travels a historic route across western Kansas that needs millions of dollars in repairs. BNSF Railway, one of North America's largest freight rail companies, owns the line but uses it sparingly. If Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico can't come up with roughly $100 million in the next few years, the train will have to find another track.

"Our difficulty is in getting the three states to come to the table," Deardoff said. "That's not been promising."

Amtrak carried more than 31 million passengers in the most recent fiscal year _ a record, but still nowhere near 600 million domestic airline passengers.

Three times as many passengers boarded short-distance trains as did they did longer routes. But the longer routes actually cost more to operate.

Amtrak has received more than $40 billion in more than 40 years. Republicans in the House of Representatives have repeatedly tried to end its federal subsidies, which would basically pull the plug on the long-distance trains. They've gained some odd company in the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington policy group, which called for states to subsidize their long-distance trains if they considered them essential.

In mid-October, Indiana became the last of 18 states to agree to pick up most of the cost to operate trains on routes of 750 miles or fewer, as required by a law Congress passed in 2008. The states consider those routes essential transportation service, from heavily Democratic California to Republican-dominated North Carolina.

But states are increasingly taking on infrastructure costs they once counted on Washington to cover, whether it's funding for highway construction or port improvements. They might not have much more room in their budgets.

And as some states and cities have discovered, once you lose a train, it's even more expensive to get it back.